A New Season Of The ‘Dr. Death’ Podcast Has Dropped With A ‘Dirty John’ Twist
If you prescribe to the life motto of eat, sleep, true crime podcast, repeat then today is a blessed day. Wondery podcast phenomenon Dr. Death is back with a brand new season, and it’s already giving me Dirty John vibes.
Dr. Death: Miracle Man will investigate the true story of Dr. Paolo Macchiarini, a handsome and charming Italian thoracic surgeon and regenerative medical researcher, who became romantically entangled with documentary producer Benita Alexander as she was profiling his work. The only problem was that, despite being sold as a star surgeon, Macchiarini was performing experimental and unethical synthetic trachea transplant surgeries, which led to the deaths of seven patients.
Alexander’s accounts of how she was gaslit and deceived by Macchiarini give the Dr. Death podcast a whole new dimension. Sound familiar? Wondery’s other successful podcast-turned-TV-series Dirty John was centred around Debra Newell, a wealthy mother who trusted John Meehan under the guise that he was respected doctor — but he turned out to be a fraudster. In the case of Macchiarini, he has been accused by Sweden’s Expert Group on Scientific Misconduct of research fraud in six papers that he co-authored.
The new season follows Dr. Death being adapted into a limited TV series starring Joshua Jackson and Alex Baldwin, which followed the Season 1 plight of Dr. Christopher Daniel Duntsch, an American neurosurgeon found guilty of gross malpractice. While Season 2 of Dr. Death relayed the disturbing story of Dr. Farid Fata, a hematologist and oncologist convicted for misdiagnosing patients, along with prescribing chemotherapy to people who did not have cancer.
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